Second Life Releases Open Source Client

by Scott Jennings on January 8, 2007

Very interesting. I expect we’ll see more of this in the future. It’s not like black hats can’t reverse engineer your packet protocol a few hours after you patch, anyway.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Second Life story without wackily surreal PR.

“We feel we may already have a bigger group of people writing code than any shared project in history, including Linux,” says Rosedale.

{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }

Cael January 8, 2007 at 10:59 am  (Quote)

Does his nose grow longer in-game after each one of these bullshit statements?

He might as well have said “we feel that we get more and on a more regular basis than Ron Jeremy and also that we are far more successful than Microsoft will ever be. Excuse me, I must formulate a Grand Unified Field Theory this afternoon.”

VPellen January 8, 2007 at 11:32 am  (Quote)

Why is it that the more time goes on, the more Second Life feels like a fucked-up dream? I keep expecting to wake up dizzy in a cold sweat, and finding out that it never existed.

jason January 8, 2007 at 12:11 pm  (Quote)

If Second Life is the Matrix, at least I know the robots will never win.

Wendelius January 8, 2007 at 12:23 pm  (Quote)

Oh well, I must be in the minority in actually appreciating the time I spend in Second Life (even though or because I don’t spend my whole free time there by far?) and thinking that an Open source client actually opens up the possibility to expose and fix some server vulnerabilities as well as make the interface less clunky and more user friendly.

But don’t let me stop the naysayers from pouring their bile on the project. *shrug*

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a good thing to let LL focus on their grid and let the users redo the atrocity that is the SL viewer.

J. January 8, 2007 at 12:29 pm  (Quote)

That’s one way to get slashdotted.

CmdrSlack January 8, 2007 at 12:53 pm  (Quote)

I’ll also agree that foisting off fixing the craptacular UI onto the users is a great idea. I am wondering, however, what the Time to Cock is going to be for the open source SL client.

Dren January 8, 2007 at 2:03 pm  (Quote)

Bigger than Linux? It must be hot.

I’ll take 3!

TPRJones January 8, 2007 at 6:33 pm  (Quote)

He’s probably including all the people using the in-game scripting language in that quote. That’d probably be somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people. That’s a lot, but not enough to be the biggest group of coders in history.

Andrew Crystall January 8, 2007 at 11:12 pm  (Quote)

Innteresting.

And Lum? You know the evils of security through obscurity :P (Or you can be Blizzard and make 99% similar protocols which gets your new game hacked by a 2 line change in the same utility, but that’s another rant!)

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